There’s still some time for the players to strike a deal, but it’s far more likely that Senate Dems and the Bush White House are headed for a fairly serious constitutional clash.
President Bush and Congress clashed Tuesday over an inquiry into the firing of federal prosecutors and appeared headed toward a constitutional showdown over demands from Capitol Hill for internal White House documents and testimony from top advisers to the president.
Under growing political pressure, the White House offered to allow members of Congressional committees to hold private interviews with Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff; Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel; and two other officials. It also offered to provide access to e-mail messages and other communications about the dismissals, but not those between White House officials.
Democrats promptly rejected the offer, which specified that the officials would not testify under oath, that there would be no transcript and that Congress would not subsequently subpoena them.
“I don’t accept his offer,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “It is not constructive, and it is not helpful to be telling the Senate how to do our investigation or to prejudge its outcome.”
Of course it’s not. During the brief White House statement and Q&A yesterday afternoon, the president described his offer as “reasonable” five times in 10 minutes. I got the sense he was trying to convince himself as much as he was lobbying those watching.
Consider his “reasonable” proposal: Rove, Miers, and others would be subject to “interviews,” in private, with no recordings or transcripts. The witnesses would not be under oath. Moreover, internal White House communications about the purge would be off-limits. (Schumer summarized the problem with the document provision: “So, if Karl Rove sent a communication to Harriet Miers and said, and this is purely hypothetical, ‘We have to get rid of US Attorney Lam. Come up with a good reason…’ and the only communication we get is the good reason that Harriet Miers sent to the Justice Department.”)
The no-transcript provision is equally problematic. As Michael Froomkin explained, the White House is saying, “[W]e want to be able to lie to Congress in a way that creates neither liability nor evidence — so we can lie about our lying after the fact and no one can prove us wrong.”
Indeed, the closer one looks at Bush’s arguments from his brief speech, the less sense it makes.
The president, for example, said his offer of private interviews was “unprecedented.” That’s not true; senior White House aides have testified under oath in public hearings before.
Similarly, Bush said presidents might get bad advice if White House aides have to worry about being subpoenaed. First, Bush already gets bad advice. Second, if senior White House aides have already testified under oath in public hearings in the past, what’s the problem?
The entire 12-minute event seemed pointless. The president accused congressional Dems of “partisanship” five times. Ultimately, Bush apparently called a press conference to play politics and accuse Dems of playing politics.
My favorite part, however, was when Bush expressed sympathy for the purged prosecutors.
“I also want to say something to the U.S. attorneys who reside. I appreciate your service to the country. And while I strongly support the Attorney General’s decision and am confident he acted appropriately, I regret these resignations turned into such a public spectacle….
“I’m sorry this, frankly, has bubbled to the surface the way it has, for the U.S. attorneys involved. I really am. These are — I put them in there in the first place; they’re decent people. They serve at our pleasure. And yet, now they’re being held up into the scrutiny of all this, and it’s just — what I said in my comments, I meant about them. I appreciated their service, and I’m sorry that the situation has gotten to where it’s got. But that’s Washington, D.C. for you. You know, there’s a lot of politics in this town.”
It’s striking when you think about it. The Bush administration decided these prosecutors weren’t loyal enough, and were taking on politically-inconvenient cases, so it fired them without cause or explanation. Then the same administration dragged their names through the mud, accusing of them (falsely) of poor on-the-job performance.
And now Bush blames “Washington, D.C.” for all the bad things that have happened to them. It’s almost as if Bush was telling the prosecutors he fired, “Don’t blame me; I just work here.”
Not surprisingly, no one’s buying into the nonsense. Dems may vote on subpoenas as early as tomorrow.
Post Script: Just as an aside, I heard from a good line through the grapevine that Dems may want to use: “What is it about ‘So Help Me God’ that Rove and Bush find so offensive?”